Control WinAmp From A Remote Machine

I’ve been looking for something like this for a while now (more about what it does in a bit); if you’re like me you probably have more than one machine (in my case, a laptop as my workstation, and a workstation as my test server/web server/db server/staging server/whatever (if that makes any sense)), plus a handful of other machines for testing new OS’s, beta software, etc.  The speakers on the laptop are absolutely dreadful of course; my workstation has the powerhouse soundcard/big badass speakers, so of course I run my tunes through it (via WinAmp)…what I don’t like doing is having to interrupt my work to get up and change tunes, and that’s where the link above comes in really handy.

In essence, it installs a mini webserver as a plugin to WinAmp; all you have to do is specify a port number, username, and password (though those are optional) so you can control WinAmp remotely through a simple web page interface.  There’s even a client piece you can install on a remote machine that sits in your systray allowing even easier access to whatever you want to listen to, as well as volume control (and it’s tiny, less than 5 megs of RAM).  Pretty slick stuff.  WMP may have an equivalent, but I banished WMP from being mapped to any audio files long ago (though I started using it for CD ripping as of v10…very fast).  It looks like this plugin has been around for a while, I wish I would have stumbled across it sooner.  Now if I could only find a “now listening to” plugin for BlogJet for WinAmp.  I’ll type it in manually this time just for kicks.

Sidenote:  What is it with coders and music?  Almost every developer I know listens to music of some kind whenever they’re laying down code for the next greatest piece of software; that’s actually one of the few things I enjoyed when working in corporate IT, put on the headphones and tune the world out as you work (and tune out your PM/QA folks/Dev Mgr as well…nothing says “leave me the hell alone” like a pair of headphones on your ears).  On top of that, I’d say more than half the coders I know play a musical instrument as well, or at the very least are very much into some sort of music.  Interesting stuff.

[Now listening to: Rob Mello/Underworld — Fantasize/Dark Long (Zabiela’s Live Dub & Long Mash Up) — James Zabiela: Alive Disc 1]